The South Etruscan Cippus Inscriptions (SECI). Acta instituti Romani Finlandiae, 44

Jorma Kaimio’s The South Etruscan Cippus Inscriptions ( SECI) is a comprehensive study of the Etruscan and Latin inscriptions incised on funerary cippi recovered from the settlements of Caere, Tarquinia, Tuscania, Volsinii veteres and novi, and Vulci.¹ SECI completes the author’s work initiated by the publication of the inscribed cippi housed in the Museo Nazionale di Tarquinia (Kaimio 2010).

The book is organized into three sections: (1) an introduction, (2) a series of commentaries on the inscriptions from each of the five communities just mentioned, and (3) a catalogue of inscriptions. The book concludes with bibliography, indices, and concordances.

The commentary covers the typology of the cippi, paleography, names and their onomastic structures, and an assortment of issues pertaining to spelling and language. Each catalogue entry includes: (i) a transcription of the inscription, (ii) references to earlier publications, (iii) the find-spot of the cippus if known, (iv) the morphology and dimensions of the cippus, (v) the size of the letterforms if known, (vi) brief notes on paleography and troublesome readings, and finally, whenever criteria are available, (vii) the date. Drawings and photographs accompany a handful of entries. Unfortunately, the photographs are not as useful to the reader as they might have been, even if one acknowledges the difficulties of photographing inscriptions on volcanic stone.

In the introduction Kaimio describes the limits and the limitations of his investigation. The catalogue is restricted to epitaphs incised on funerary cippi made of volcanic stone ( nenfro, peperino, macco). Each community, with the exception of Tarquinia and Tuscania, developed its own distinctive forms and, in the case of Caere, the distinction was extended to the gender of the deceased (cippi in the form of a house represented females; those in the form of a column represented males). Most cippi were less than 2 feet high and the field for incising text was cramped. Hence their inscriptions were short and abbreviations common; content consisted in large part of the names of the deceased plus filiation, although there were notable exceptions (for which, see below). The letters were typically less than 2 inches high, but letters less than an inch in height were not uncommon. For the most part, the cippi were designed to be free-standing and were placed at the entrances of tombs, presumably for literate members of the family to read. The cippus and the content of the epitaph were commissioned by members of the deceased’s family. The texts were generally inscribed by professional carvers, but the letters on some cippi were so poorly made that one suspects they were incised by a member of the deceased’s family.

Despite the fact that space for incising the epitaphs was at a premium, regional differences did exist. The epitaphs from Tarquinia and Tuscania, both Etruscan and Latin, frequently indicated the age of the deceased, e.g., sentes . l(arθ) . σ(eθres) . svalce | avil . XXX, “Larth Sentes, (son of) Shetre, lived for 30 years.” (K301).¹ This inscription, K301, illustrates another feature of Etruscan funerary inscriptions from this area: the deceased’s gentilicium was highlighted by being placed in initial position in the onomastic phrase. The Etruscan cippus inscriptions from Caere adopted a Latin-style patronymic; it was expressed by the praenomen of the father and the word for “son” ( clan) or “daughter” ( seχ), both generally abbreviated. Roughly a third of the Etruscan epitaphs (13 of 37) on the cippi from Vulci were incised with a nominal sentence of the eca σuθi type, e.g., eca σuθi : θanχvilus : maσnial, “This (is) the tomb (lit. ‘resting place’) of Thankhvil Mashni.” (K994).

The views on orthography and language embraced by Kaimio are generally uncontroversial, but a few items merit a note. (a) The author lists the Latin spelling under the label “diphthong” (pg. 26) and cites the verb ueixit as an example. But Latin uiuo ‘live’ did not have a diphthong as its root vowel; it had a long ī (from earlier *ih ₃). The digraph was used to spell long ī in the second half of the 2 ^nd century BCE. (b) The Latin phrase otuma femna (K95) is not discussed in the commentary even though it is one of the few features in the Latin inscriptions characteristic of sub-elite varieties of the language. (c)The spelling of word-final /s/ by means of the letter at Volsinii is treated by Kaimio (pp. 20, 87) as evidence that this sound became voiced in this regional variety of Etruscan in the 3 ^rd century BCE. However, the author does not inform the reader that this view is controversial, that the change is restricted (according to the view of Van Heems 2003) to contexts in which the next word begins with /w/, /r/, or /l/, and that the evidence amounts to a grand total of four forms. (d) Kaimio asserts (pg. 51) that the sign for the palatal sibilant in the Etruscan of Caere is an “upright four-bar sade,” not a four-bar sigma. This is a minority view and one that has, as far as I know, never been persuasively argued. I refer the reader to Cristofani 1978: 11–14 for the standard view.

In the discussion of the cippus inscriptions from Caere, Kaimio notes that the nominative form of the Etruscan enclitic article, which should have the phonological form /(i)ʃa/, is sometimes spelled by means of the letter (= /s/). He concludes that the signs and <σ> are often “mixed together in spelling” (pg. 51) and that the “opposition between the phonemes realized as and <σ> cannot have been clear any longer at the time of the cippi of Caere” (pg. 54). The data suggest otherwise.²